First (and a bit late), Happy New Year ! 2017 will be the year of Dangerous Rays Alpha 18 version release and things are going very well regarding the development !
Here is what has been done since the last dev diary:

- 3D Assets Integration

Now that the engine is stable and enough feature complete i can start to integrate new 3D assets into the game (plenty of new 3D model has been made and they just wait for integration). Today i will talk about the buildings.
They were some complains about the buildings in Alpha 17 version. Most of players were thinking that the buildings were too empty, that the geometry was not very detailed, that textures were too "clean" and repetitive.

I took all this feedback in account when designing the buildings for Alpha 18 version and here is the result:

As you can see the new buildings are much more detailed, you can even compare the 2 versions on this image:

Quite an improvement isn't it ?

Building now look much more "organic" and the texture work eliminate the texture repetition problem (it will look even better when the procedural decals system will be added in the engine).
This time there is really an artistic direction (old eastern architecture). So you can expect a visually coherent world this time. Alpha 18 will feature around 100 different buildings to visit at release and much more in the future.

Please note that the buildings will of course be filled with various furniture (tables, cabinets, junk...) in the future. You can expect to see that in some weeks. Building furniture has also been drastically improved !

- Vegetation Rendering Improvements

I have improved the vegetation system to handle more trees/bushes/rocks. Rendering was also improved. Vegetation start to look quite good now and the framerate is not affected too much with this new system. Compared to the old Alpha 17 system this is a gigantic step forward.

Of course what you are seeing here are just some dev/test screenshots, the vegetation will be more dense and varied at release time. The new system support up to 256 tree types, the old system was limited to 32 in alpha 17.

- PhysX 3.4 Integration

PhysX 3.4 is available since 1 week and i have already integrated it in the new engine (my PhysX implementation was already very mature and feature complete). Numerous bugs were fixed and the performance of the physics engine is improved. Everything is stable and ready for future physics vehicles integration in the game.

About PhysX, what do we get if we don't have Nvidia GPU ? I know that the CPU will be handling the computing, but will not it be too much for the CPU to handle ? Any idea about computing physics in GPU aside from Nvidia PhysX ?

If you have an NVIDIA GPU the whole physics calculations will be done by the GPU. If not then calculations will be done by the CPU. My implementation in Dangerous Rays engine is using every available CPU core to speed up the calculations. To be honest the CPU based physics is perfectly fine and very nicely optimized. It do the job perfectly. GPU accelerated physics is just "the cherry on the cake" but everything is fine without it.

Thank you so much for your hard work, OldSnake!
This is indeed looking really good I'm very excited what will come in the future!

Also like that most of the known vibe of the previous alphas is still there, even with completely new rendering systems and assets But also don't be afraid to change it a bit as you see need for it. It's a pretty dark atmosphere, which I personally like but maybe not everyone on the market.
Perhaps you can do some post-effect colorization options? I've seen some other games providing different LUT-Presets so users can quickly adjust the rendering style to their liking...